


like someone in love

by cloudcjty



Series: Candidate [2]
Category: Star Wars RPF
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, candidate, i wrote this for a friend awhile ago shout out cannah fisher, oh yall thought i was done, so did I, this takes place during part one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:53:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28604775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudcjty/pseuds/cloudcjty
Summary: This is a little drabble that I wrote a few months ago - it's a missing moment from Candidate and looking back, I thought it was cute. It takes place sometime during part one, perhaps before winter break but after Thanksgiving. You don't HAVE to read Candidate to understand this, but I hope you will.
Relationships: Carrie Fisher/Harrison Ford
Series: Candidate [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2096046
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	like someone in love

Rolling her palms over the thick, woolen fabric, Carrie hadn’t noticed that her thumbs had begun to burn, the texture eating away at her fingertips, but her thoughts doing the same. The rapid-fire, quick, one-off questions that Jennifer had fed her over her biology textbook had been long forgotten, though they were only last night. Jennifer had stayed slumped on the carpet of Carrie’s floor, resting her head between the papers she had to revise, mumbling her inquiries. Jennifer wasn’t able to focus on her essay, and Carrie wasn’t able to focus on her words. 

She looked up from the hem of her sweater, returning her eyes to the chalkboard that hung high on the wall, one that she had to tilt her neck up to reach from being too short. She had exhausted the muscles lining her shoulderblades from eyeing the writing earlier, but was able to ignore it now. Her lips tightened and lifted slightly, feeling her tongue push into her throat as she tried to hide her smile, but only from herself, in the attempt not to burst out a laugh. Not a laugh from becoming tickled, or a heated scoff, but a laugh of some sort of genuine happiness. A happiness that wasn’t happy, but the happiness that led to her scalp tingling and legs crossing, aching just to run up to Harrison and kick up her feet, to rope her arms around his back and let her faith in him hold her up. That faith was wavering, wavering in a way that broke through to stableness, a body of work that grew out of emotion. 

Emotion was a foreign object, less of a concept, and more of something tangible. It was difficult to conceptualize a feeling that she hadn’t felt, and much easier to just envision her emotions as a ball of fire, blue, then red, then yellow, and back, rotating and floating above the palm of her hand, changing and twisting, its shape moving from a sphere to a rhombus, and perhaps even a Mobius strip, something that she didn’t understand, but something she could have. 

“Of course I’m in love, idiot,” Carrie ridiculed Mark, barging into her dorm room and overhearing Jennifer’s questions. He’d rolled his eyes and shook his head, and left with the shrug of his shoulders and a pep in his step, because even if he didn’t believe her fully, he had to believe her halfway. 

She didn’t believe in butterflies in her stomach, because, after all, that sounded uncomfortable and love should never be that. Instead, it manifested in a quickening in her chest as Harrison finally walked into the classroom, feeling her ear hit against her shoulder and her hands reach to her chin. Her arms hit back down quickly, not knowing if that action hit against her desk, and if it did, how loud, but that didn’t seem to matter. Her motion, tilting her head, resting her chin to her fingertips, was something so stereotypical, but it wasn’t something she found embarrassing, just, unrepresentative. Not how she truly felt. 

She felt like her teeth were ready to fall out, to grow up and to grow old, stumbling over doorways and slouching over her food, because all she needed in her life was the emotions she felt here. How she was six rows back but could smell his aftershave, stuck in her nose and no one else’s, how every time he picked up a piece of yellow chalk she was reminded of the green jacket she left on his desk, that he left hanging onto his bookshelf, welcoming her to pull it on every time the air turned on in his office. Perhaps he was a yellow pigment, and she was green, there was a blue missing piece to connect their colors, and that could be the way she was feeling. 

A strand of his hair hadn’t been successfully slicked back, poking out from the back of his head, stringy and hardened from his hair gel. It was something endearing, rather than an annoyance. The first time she had seen him she’d rendered him unprofessional, for mistakes much less severe. His fingers gathered the pigmented dust in a way that she knew he could clean, and unlike herself, his hands wouldn’t be stained all day. A level of perfection, but not perfection, yet not imperfect either. 

Carrie blinked away a grain of kohl in the corner of her eye left behind by her eyeliner, and at the moment that her eyes were closed she saw the image of the two of them together. If that was what love was, it wasn’t what she had known it to be. Not kisses under streetlamps and declarations to the world, showers of gifts and following each other. It was better compared to finding a four-leaf clover, taking so long, and finally getting it, but not putting in any work other than sifting through the grass. Loving was easy, even if she didn’t know that it was supposed to be. 

What she knew of love was the results, what came after the knowing. The Knowing being the small moments that made your back stand up straight, or not being able to tie your shoes because of your own thoughts, distracted by something you didn’t know you would ever be distracted by. Dreaming of seeing one more hair delectably out of place, finding something placed just for yourself, and letting yourself fall into that, thinking about that, never letting go.

**Author's Note:**

> Also, for everyone who read Candidate and could tell that I wanted to live in New York and go to college there like the characters, I did get into college in NYC :) I won’t say where bc duh but :) thanks Candidate! And I’m going for literature so prepare for even more fanfiction lol


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